In a new joint report from Deloitte and ExactTarget Marketing Cloud, marketers can discover how CMOs today perceive and rise to the challenges before them.
Based on a survey conducted by the CMO Club, the report is titled, “Bridging the Digital Divide: How CMOs Can Rise to Meet 5 Expanding Expectations.”
Suzanne Kunkel, Principal, Deloitte Consulting, LLP, Leader of Customer and CMO Services, offered her views on the report.
“CMOs are going through a rapid transformation,” Kunkel said in the report. “Increasingly, CMOs are asked to be more than proficient marketers, but also to act as the stewards of the customer within their organizations, building bridges across functions to enable customer engagement. It’s the CMO’s job to lead the dismantling of silos that separate web, call centers, mobile, and in-store channels to create the consistent, personalized experience that today’s technology-empowered customers demand.”
Kunkel added: “A spearhead for actionable customer insights via analytics, the CMO is at the center of proving marketing ROI, innovating digital interactions, and launching new technologies that create enterprise-wide customer-centricity. This report outlines five expectations that today’s CMOs should meet as they build customer-centric organizations. These findings reveal clues that you can consider to chart your own path toward building an organization that cultivates profitable, lasting customer relationships.”
Here are the report’s five Expanding Expectations:
Take on Topline Growth:
More than half (53%) of surveyed CMOs felt an increased pressure to enable revenue growth—making this the biggest change to their teams’ responsibilities over the past few years. While the expectation for the CMO to drive revenue is pronounced, many CMOs are faced with a conversion path they don’t entirely own.
Marketing may be signing up for big numbers, but the customer purchase journey is splintered across product, sales, and service. That’s why CMOs who agree to a revenue target should verify a clear path to conversion with the rest of the C-suite.
Advances in real-time customer feedback have given CMOs unprecedented ability to listen to dialogues around product design. For example, one major channel where customers express opinions on product is social media—a channel largely owned by marketing.
Defragmented customer journeys and personalized experiences are likely to be the result of CMOs having more input into product strategy and execution.
Own the Customer Experience:
Social media, email, mobile messaging, and web channels host a number of customer-brand interactions, from social media advertising to customer service. Since ownership of these digital channels has increasingly fallen to marketing, customer service and the entire customer experience have begun to move to marketing as well. The report shows that 38% of CMOs indicated an increased role in customer service (via social media, call center, or a similar function).
Nearly a quarter, however, feel underprepared to manage these major customer service touchpoints, necessitating a greater push from CMOs to fully assume control of the customer experience and increase revenue as a result.
According to Forrester, the revenue impact from a modest improvement in customer experience can range from $177 million to $311 million, and the impact from a 10-percentage-point improvement in customer experience score can yield more than $1 billion.
Today’s CMO is expected to do more than blanket customers with brand awareness and messaging. The CMO’s responsibilities now follow through helping and serving, with a focus on collaborating with other departments to place the customer experience first.
Dig Into Data-Based Insights:
After top-notch analytics talent is hired, the real work can begin on turning that data-having into data-doing. As Marks & Spencer Director of Multichannel Development David Walmsley explains, “We must move from numbers keeping score to numbers that drive better actions.” CMOs must invest in tools that support efforts to better personalize and optimize over time, built on a solid data foundation, and this is increasingly the case: web personalization and marketing automation were the top two digital marketing areas where CMOs planned to focus more efforts in 2014.
Operate in Real Time:
Real-time efforts have replaced segment-centric batch and blast marketing, giving customers exactly what they want, all the while respecting their preferences as a unique person−not a persona.
When entering the world of real-time digital marketing, CMOs can be effective by automating two or three of their most important and common customer touch points that align with available data.
The customer journey possibilities are infinite, and it’s easy to feel daunted by the hundreds or thousands of touch points that could hypothetically be automated. But from this small scale of two or three experiences, CMOs and marketing teams can learn and grow their scaled automation efforts from there.
Master the Metrics that Matter:
To prove that the changes and investments they’re making are driving revenue, CMOs know that they need to be focused on metrics that matter to the business. At the top of that list, 53% of surveyed CMOs said ROI was that metric. CMOs understand that they’re increasingly expected to do more than plant and water the seeds of feel-good brand awareness, and many feel that ROI is the most important measure of their labors.